Even as NVIDIA is taking its own sweet time to complete building its lineup of DirectX 11 compliant GPUs to target all market segments, AMD, which got a 6 months' headstart into releasing its lineup, which ended up targeting all market segments in a span of 5 months, is readying the Radeon HD 6000 series for launch well within this year. Just as the Radeon HD 5000 series GPU family was codenamed Evergreen with its members codenamed after evergreen trees (such as Cypress, Juniper, Redwood, Cedar), the Radeon HD 6000 is codenamed "Southern Islands", with its members codenamed after islands in the Caribbean (not islands in the Mediterranean).

"Bart" (after Saint Barthélemy island) is the codename for the performance/upper-mid segment GPU, a successor to the "Juniper" Radeon HD 5700 series. "Cayman" (after Cayman Islands) is the enthusiast GPU, successor to Cypress, and will go into making SKUs that succeed the Radeon HD 5800 series. Finally, the king of the hill is codenamed "Antilles" (after Antilles Islands), it is the dual-GPU SKU that makes use of two Cayman GPUs, successor to the Radeon HD 5970 "Hemlock". AMD partners will be in a position to sell graphics cards based on these by November 2010. The Radeon HD 6970 "Antilles" should be out by December 2010. The lower-half of the family will likely release next year.

Don't really give a crap about what AMD's internal names for them are. Let's me see some specs already!!! lol

Great to see the performance 6 series like the 6970 coming out this year. Lets hope they make it good, make it fast and lets hope we see some good competition coming from the green camp. May the cards be fast and the prices low.

Cannot wait for these!!! Looks like I will skip the 5000 series all together.

Click to expand...

I was thinking the same, i had been considering getting a 5870 or a g460 and although i may still depending on price drops but it would be nice to jump a generation and get a massive (i hope) fps jump over my 4870(and yes i know the current gen is anyway ).

Still have my stock 4870, which ive had since release. Plays the newest games perfectly fine

Click to expand...

I admit im only running at 1680x1050 with 4870 clocks at 800mhz and 4ghz effective and i can max most games out or just cut a little aa out. But i would love to go to a 3 monitor 1920x1200 eyefinity or nv surround setup and that means upgrade time.

I'd give it a solid 20%-30% or so increase over the the current 5 series if they really come out with a beastly architecture. But really, no one can tell.. they haven't showed anything even remotely of how it;s going to perform.

Well IIRC I read that the 6xxx series will perform well in tessellation ... its same as the 5xxx but with better clock speeds ... lesser power consumption ... and with more tessellators ... correct me if im wrong ...

I expect this will perform around 10-20% better than the current 5xxx series ... just my 2c ...